Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America
At the height of the controversy over American historical monuments, Harvard poet and Atlantic staff writer Clint Smith visited some of them. He wanted to see firsthand the places where America memorializes people, places, and events associated with slavery. For those who love terminology, Smith was primarily interested in historiography, not history; that is, he cared more about how we tell our stories than necessarily what stories we tell.
Smith presents a detailed travelogue of seven historical sites: six in America, and one African slave port. Smith records the visiting experience, talking with the guides and conservators responsible for transmitting the historical narrative onto listening audiences. He records how the stories told to audiences, including tourists, corresponds with the documentary record—and how it doesn’t. The differences can be astounding for dedicated history readers.
Some locations have unsurprising responses. Smith visits the Whitney Plantation, a tourist destination dedicated specifically to slavery. There he finds a painstakingly restored image of the sufferings enslaved Black Americans endured, even at putatively benevolent masters’ hands. He also visits Blandford Cemetery, the largest surviving Confederate graveyard. Visitors flock to revel in Lost Cause mythology, while pained curators try to correct the record for audiences who don’t want to hear.
Other locations prove more unexpected. Monticello, for instance. The historical trust that owns Thomas Jefferson’s plantation once notoriously whitewashed his reputation, and aggressively denied his relationship with Sally Hemings, but has reversed itself, becoming a haven for serious historians and truth-seekers. Gorèe Island, off the Senegal coast, has moved millions to tears with its brutal narrative of the Transatlantic Slave Trade—a narrative Smith admits is probably mythologized.
Between the locations, Smith finds an America caught in an awkward transition. Americans overall, including White Americans, have become more willing to face our slaveholding history, and the long-term consequences which slavery continues to wreak on the present. But faced with this rapidly changing shared history, some Americans simply refuse to face the evidence. Others, even worse, cling to myths that contradict the copious documents and works of serious historians.
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| Clint Smith, Ph.D. |
History isn’t just a matter of scholarship and research. It also involves storytelling, in oral and written form. For instance, Smith visits Galveston Island, the site of the Juneteenth event, where Union soldiers proclaimed freedom to Texas’ enslaved population. Texas became the first state to proclaim Juneteenth as a state holiday, and historical reenactors perform the Juneteenth liberation every year, an event Smith describes as emotionally fraught and almost religious.
Yet Smith also notes that one in ten American public-school students attend school in Texas, where the state’s board of education continues to promulgate textbook standards which whitewash slavery’s impact. Lost Cause mythology permeates Texas’ official state history teaching standards. Sure, enacting Juneteenth is important for Texans to experience history. But that only reaches those who voluntarily make the pilgrimage, and I question how many White Texans do so.
One of Smith’s most telling narratives happens in Manhattan, a site not normally associated with slavery. But New York State didn’t abolish slavery until 1827, so binary narratives of “slave” and “free” states don’t hold water. With a professional tour guide’s assistance, Smith finds a plaque memorializing a slave market which existed for fifty years on Wall Street, within spitting distance of the Stock Exchange that now embodies American capitalism.
This plaque exists because of citizen activism. Manhattan’s Black population remembered the slave market in oral tradition, but no official body remembered anything. Then, during the Occupy Wall Street protests, one activist took it upon himself to comb the historical records. The activist, whom Smith doesn’t name, pulled maps, records, and images demonstrating the exact location of Wall Street’s market, forcing city fathers to create the first-ever official memorial.
Examples like this flood Smith’s narrative with exciting life. History, in Smith’s telling, isn’t only events which happened; it’s also the living, breathing humans who transmit those events to coming generations. Some historians make scrupulous efforts to preserve facts accurately, even when they reflect poorly on our ancestors; others market a feel-good panacea, sometimes because their hidebound audience will accept nothing else.
One wonders how Smith’s book will read for future generations. We exist in times of turmoil, as Americans increasingly favor honesty over mythology. Our official history, what Smith calls our “public memory,” is changing rapidly, and nobody knows what final form it will take. Smith provides a snapshot of that transition, taking place in the late 2010s and early 2020s. Smith shows us history as process, not product.
On a similar topic: Leaving the Church of St. Robert E. Lee
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